In the _Hero_ the expository prologue is lost, but we know that the prologue was the omniscient _Heros_, who adequately prepared the audience for what was to follow.[8] Here a husband (unrecognized), his wife, their “exposed daughter,” not yet known as such, and two lovers of this daughter, one a slave, the other a rich neighbor, all enter a tangle of delusion to which the audience has the key. In the _Georgos_ a man expresses to a woman his desire to marry her daughter. He does not know that he is the girl’s father. As the woman—bound to secrecy—stands wringing her hands in despair, the audience—apparently informed of the secret—experiences a situation as poignant as that of the _Oedipus_. And finally in the Petrograd fragment of the _Phasma_ we find a mother’s furtive visits to her daughter, born out of wedlock, and an entangled love affair, a situation which again involves the use of irony, since a fragment from the prologue shows us that the audience has been informed in advance. It would be hazardous to say that Menander always lets the spectator into the secret beforehand so as to make use of dramatic irony, but it is striking that he does so in every instance where we possess enough of his plot in the original to test his methods. It is apparently his usual method of procedure. This is also in accord with his well-known predilection for Tyche, the counterpart in comedy of tragic fate. We need not suppose, as has often been done, that his constant reference to Tyche springs from his own philosophical doctrine. Such well-known passages as “Chance holds the helm; mortal forethought is but a delusion” (_Frag._, Kock, 482), etc., are, of course, comments of characters in the play. They need not be expressions of the dramatist’s own creed. But such comments would naturally come frequently in plays built on the conventional tragic form which required that the players grope their obscure way through the action in front of an audience which knew the end.